Assessing the War on Terror

Western and Middle Eastern Perspectives

Charles Webel, Mark Tomass

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781315469157
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This volume is a collection of articles that critically examine the efficacy, ethics, and impact of the War on Terror as it has evolved since 9/11.

During the decade and a half of the Global War on Terror (GWOT), numerous books have considered the political, psychosocial, and economic impacts of terrorism. However, there has been little systematic effort to examine the effectiveness of the GWOT in achieving its goals. Furthermore, there is virtually nothing that presents a comparative analysis of the GWOT by the people most directly affected by it—citizens and scholars from conflict zones in the Middle East. There is, therefore, great need for a book that analyzes the strategies, tactics, and outcomes of the GWOT and that also presents facts and ideas that are missing or underrepresented in the dominant public narratives. The contributions in this volume were chosen to specifically address this need. In doing so, it uniquely provides not only Western perspectives of the GWOT, but also importantly includes perspectives from the Middle East and those most directly affected by it, including contributions from scholars and policy makers. Overall, the contributions demonstrate how views differ based on geographical location, and how views have changed during the course of the still-evolving War on Terror.

The book will be of much interest to students and scholars of terrorism and counter-terrorism, foreign policy, Middle Eastern politics, security studies and IR, as well as policy makers.

Part I
Framing and assessing the War on Terror

Mark Tomass

In the opening essay of this book, Noam Chomsky uses the official definition of “terrorism” in US and British law, “the calculated use of violence or threat of violence to attain goals that are political, religious, or ideological in nature … through intimidation, coercion, or instilling fear,” to show that the US has employed state-directed international terrorism since the Monroe Doctrine has been a guide for foreign policy. While Ronald Reagan’s “War on Terror,” which he declared in 1981, produced an unusually extreme record of terrorism inflicted upon the third world, especially in Latin America, that era was not a departure from the norm. In that war, Reagan used the phrase “the evil scourge of terrorism,” a cover term for his “War on Terror,” to enforce the US right to dominate the American continent and beyond. Accordingly, US policymakers used violence and economic strangulation to subdue defiant states and to provide haven to international terrorists, whose names would be common knowledge in the West if the US were serious about fighting terrorism.

Chomsky claims that successive US administrations’ policies have inspired, not defeated, radical Islamist terrorism by promoting a deficient moral and intellectual culture. In 2010, the US celebrated the twentieth anniversary of “the fall of the tyranny of the enemy” after the collapse of the communist regimes in Eastern and Central Europe, while it kept mum “about the culmination of the hideous atrocities” in US domains that are “so glaring that it takes real dedication to miss it.”

To end the evil of terrorism, Chomsky makes three policy recommendations: First, end the West’s role as a perpetrator of terrorism. Second, attempt to address legitimate grievances. Third, deal with an act of terror, like any criminal act, by identifying and apprehending the suspects and carrying out an honest judicial process, as opposed to using the current techniques that enhance rather than mitigate the threat of terrorism.

In the second essay, Oliver P. Richmond and Ioannis Tellidis argue that what they call “orthodox” approaches to terrorism normally rest on the “exclusion” of terrorist actors until they renounce the use of violence. Such exclusion produces a “catch 22” situation in which terrorists must give up their leverage before arriving at the negotiating table, which makes an “orthodox” approach to terrorism more like “state-building” than “peacebuilding.” In contrast, Richmond and Tellidis present a “post-terrorism” and “post-liberal” approach that focuses on the need to develop a broad and inclusive peace process to induce all actors away from supporting political or structural violence and toward negotiating a sustainable compromise. They advocate the development of institutions that bridge local and international differences, thus producing a hybrid and more inclusive model that may gain wide acceptance, including by extremists. In their “post-terrorism” approach, they encourage engaging with the root causes of violence and its prevention. Building on the commonly accepted fact that responses to terrorism may prevent peace processes from proceeding, Richmond and Tellidis argue that orthodox approaches to both analyzing and combating terrorism have tended to replicate the conditions of conflict. Top-down policies often obscure efforts that seek to produce a durable and sustainable peace because they exacerbate the motives that terrorism draw on, enable new terrorism supporters motivated by cultural, identity, or welfare exclusions, and reinforce the same institutions that produce such exclusions, thereby marginalizing local interests that facilitate the re-emergence of the conditions for violence.

After 9/11, the US and its “coalition of the willing” went to war, and the war rages on with new challenges and an unforeseeable end. The clinical psychologist, Sarton Weinraub, asks: What have we learned? Can this trauma ever be worked through? Weinraub’s experiences as a survivor, New York City resident, and psychologist suggest we have a long way to go. He offers his practical insight into the psychology of those who experienced the 9/11 terrorist attacks, based on his personal experience as a survivor and as a psychological caregiver to those who faced the attacks on the ground. Weinraub’s “Trauma and the City,” in addition to offering samples of trauma studies relating to 9/11, claims that the phenomenon of post-traumatic stress disorder has not been given the attention it deserves, as it has impacted millions of people who experienced the events of 9/11, regardless of how far they were physically from Ground Zero.

1
The evil scourge of terrorism

Reality, construction, remedy¹

Noam Chomsky

Erich Fromm lecture – April 3, 2010

The President could not have been more justified when he condemned “the evil scourge of terrorism.” I am quoting Ronald Reagan, who came into office in 1981 declaring that a focus of his foreign policy would be state-directed international terrorism, “the plague of the modern age” and “a return to barbarism in our time,” to sample some of the rhetoric of his administration. When George W. Bush declared a “War on Terror” 20 years later, he was re-declaring the war, an important fact that is worth exhuming from Orwell’s memory hole if we hope to understand the nature of the evil scourge of terrorism, or more importantly, if we hope to understand ourselves. We do not need the famous Delphi inscription to recognize that there can be no more important task. Just as a personal aside, that critical necessity was forcefully brought home to me almost 70 years ago in my first encounter with Erich Fromm’s work, in his classic essay on the escape to freedom in the modern world, and the grim paths that the modern free individual was tempted to choose in the effort to escape the loneliness and anguish that accompanied the newly-discovered freedom—matters all too pertinent today, unfortunately.

The reasons why Reagan’s War on Terror has been dispatched to the repository of unwelcome facts are understandable and informative—about ourselves. Instantly, Reagan’s War on Terror became a savage terrorist war, leaving hundreds of thousands of tortured and mutilated corpses in the wreckage of Central America, tens of thousands more in the Middle East, and an estimated 1.5 million killed by South African terror that was strongly supported by the Reagan administration in violation of congressional sanctions. All of these murderous exercises of course had pretexts. The resort to violence always does. In the Middle East, Reagan’s decisive support for Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, which killed some 15,000–20,000 people and destroyed much of southern Lebanon and Beirut, was based on the pretense that it was in self-defense against PLO rocketing of the Galilee, a brazen fabrication: Israel recognized at once that the threat was PLO diplomacy, which might have undermined Israel’s illegal takeover of the occupied territories. In Africa, support for the marauding of the apartheid state was officially justified within the framework of the War on Terror: it was necessary to protect white South Africa from one of the world’s “more notorious terrorist groups,” Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress, so Washington determined in 1988. The pretexts in the other cases were no more impressive.

For the most part, the victims of Reaganite terror were defenseless civilians, but in one case the victim was a state, Nicaragua, which could respond through legal channels. Nicaragua brought its charges to the World Court, which condemned the US for “unlawful use of force”—in lay terms, international terrorism—in its attack on Nicaragua from its Honduran bases, and ordered the US to terminate the assault and pay substantial reparations. The aftermath is instructive. Congress responded to the Court judgment by increasing aid to the US-run mercenary army attacking Nicaragua, while the press condemned the Court as a “hostile forum” and therefore irrelevant. The same Court had been highly relevant a few years earlier when it ruled in favor of the US against Iran. Washington dismissed the Court judgment with contempt. In doing so, it joined the distinguished company of Libya’s Qaddafi and Albania’s Enver Hoxha. Libya and Albania have since joined the world of law-abiding states in this respect, so now the US stands in splendid isolation. Nicaragua then brought the matter to the UN Security Council, which passed two resolutions calling on all states to observe international law. The resolutions were vetoed by the US, with the assistance of Britain and France, which abstained. All of this passed virtually without notice, and has been expunged from history.

Also forgotten—or rather, never noticed—is the fact that the “hostile forum” had bent over backwards to accommodate Washington. The Court rejected almost all of Nicaragua’s case, presented by a distinguished Harvard University international lawyer, on the grounds that when the US had accepted World Court jurisdiction in 1946, it added a reservation exempting itself from charges under international treaties, specifically the Charters of the United Nations and the Organization of American States. Accordingly, the US is self-entitled to carry out aggression and other crimes that are far more serious than international terrorism. The Court correctly recognized this exemption, one aspect of much broader issues of sovereignty and global dominance that I will put aside.

Such thoughts as these should be uppermost in our minds when we consider the evil scourge of terrorism. We should also recall that although the Reagan years do constitute a chapter of unusual extremism in the annals of terrorism, they are not some strange departure from the norm. We find much the same at the opposite end of the political spectrum as well: the Kennedy administration. One illustration is Cuba. According to long-standing myth, thoroughly dismantled by recent scholarship, the US intervened in Cuba in 1898 to secure its liberation from Spain. In reality, the intervention was designed to prevent Cuba’s imminent liberation from Spain, turning it into a virtual colony of the United States. In 1959, Cuba finally did liberate itself, causing consternation in Washington. Within months, the Eisenhower administration planned in secret to overthrow the government, and initiated bombing and economic sanctions. The basic thinking was expressed by a high State Department official: Castro would be removed “through disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship [so] every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba [in order to] bring about hunger, desperation and [the] overthrow of the government.”

The incoming Kennedy administration took over and escalated these programs. The reasons are frankly explained in the internal record, since declassified. Violence and economic strangulation were undertaken in response to Cuba’s “successful defiance” of US policies going back 150 years; no Russians, but rather the Monroe Doctrine, which established Washington’s right to dominate the hemisphere.

The concerns of the Kennedy administration went beyond the need to punish successful defiance. The administration feared that the Cuban example might infect others with the thought of “taking matters into their own hands,” an idea with great appeal throughout the continent because “the distribution of land and other forms of national wealth greatly favors the propertied classes and the poor and underprivileged, stimulated by the example of the Cuban revolution, are now demanding opportunities for a decent living.” That was the warning conveyed to incoming President Kennedy by his Latin America advisor, liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger. The analysis was soon confirmed by the CIA, which observed that “Castro’s shadow looms large because social and economic conditions throughout Latin America invite opposition to ruling authority and encourage agitation for radical change,” for which Castro’s Cuba might provide a model.

Ongoing plans for invasion were soon implemented. When the invasion failed at the Bay of Pigs, Washington turned to a major terrorist war. The president assigned responsibility for the war to his brother, Robert Kennedy, whose highest priority was to bring “the terrors of the earth” to Cuba, in the words of his biographer, Arthur Schlesinger. The terrorist war was no slight affair; it was also a major factor in bringing the world to the verge of nuclear war in 1962, and was resumed as soon as the missile crisis ended. The terrorist war continued through the century from US territory, though in later years Washington no longer undertook terrorist attacks against Cuba, but only provided the base for them, and continues to provide haven to some of the most notorious international terrorists, with a long record of these and other crimes: Orlando Bosch, Luis Posada Carriles, and numerous others whose names would be well-known in the West if the concerns about terrorism were principled. Commentators are polite enough not to recall the Bush doctrine declared when he attacked Afghanistan: those who harbor terrorists are as guilty as the terrorists themselves, and must be treated accordingly, by bombing and invasion.

Perhaps this is enough to illustrate that state-directed international terrorism is considered an appropriate tool of diplomacy across the political spectrum. Nevertheless, Reagan was the first modern president to employ the audacious device of concealing his resort to “the evil scourge of terrorism” under the cloak of a “War on Terror.”

The audacity of Reaganite terrorism was as impressive as its scale. To select only one example, for which events in Germany provided a pretext, in April 1986, the US Air Force bombed Libya, killing dozens of civilians. To add a personal note, on the day of the bombing, at about 6:30 pm, I received a phone call from Tripoli from the Mideast correspondent of ABC TV, Charles Glass, an old friend. He advised me to watch the 7 pm TV news. In 1986, all the TV channels ran their major news programs at 7 pm. I did so, and exactly at 7 pm, agitated news anchors switched to their facilities in Libya so that they could present, live, the US bombing of Tripoli and Benghazi, the first bombing in history enacted for prime time TV—no slight logistical feat: the bombers were denied the right to cross France and had to take a long detour over the Atlantic to arrive just in time for the evening news. After showing the exciting scenes of the cities in flames, the TV channels switched to Washington, for sober discussion of how the US was defending itself from Libyan terror, under the newly devised doctrine of “self-defense against future attack.” Officials informed the country that they had certain knowledge that Libya had carried out a bombing of a disco in Berlin a few days earlier in which a US soldier had been killed. The certainty reduced to zero shortly after, as quietly conceded well after its purpose had been served. And it would have been hard to find even a raised eyebrow about the idea that the disco bombing would have justified the murderous assault on Libyan civilians.

The media were also polite enough not to notice the curious timing. Commentators were entranced by the solidity of the non-existent evidence and Wash-ington’s dedication to law. In a typical reaction, the NYT editors explained that “even the most scrupulous citizen can only approve and applaud the American attacks on Libya … the United ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction
• PART I Framing and assessing the War on Terror
• PART II Hearing from the victims of terror-inflicted regions
• PART III Calculating the costs of the War on Terror
• PART IV Analyzing, negotiating with, and ending terror groups
• Conclusion
• Index